The Bitcoin Gold development team has recently released an update about the situation of the currency after last week’s attack. During the attack, hackers were able to control 51% of the Bitcoin Gold network and weaponized it via a double spend attack, which allowed them to steal funds from cryptocurrency exchanges.

The update has officially confirmed that the attacked gained control of the network by having majority control of its hashrates and reorganizing the blockchain to reverse transactions, which enabled the hacker to get $18,6 Million USD worth of Bitcoin Gold.

Bitcoin Gold Developers Blame Equihash For the Attack

The Bitcoin Gold developers see the currency’s mining algorithm, Equihash, as the main problem that enabled the attack. Equihash, which is also used by many other currencies, renders a large pool of available hashpower, which is bigger than the individual hashpower of the members of the network and the attacker used this as an exploit.

Bitcoin Gold got 51% attacked. Miners have no issue with attacking BTG because if it dies, they could easily switch to mine another coin that also uses Equihash POW. This is not the case for Bitcoin/Litecoin where they are the dominant coin for their respective mining algorithms. https://t.co/ThOzSFz5tQ

Jack Liao is spreading rumors now that Bitmain 51%ed BTG. No, it was not Bitmain. It is possible that Jack Liao himself attacked BTG as a way to further steal funds from the community and attack BCH fork.

The team had already started to plan to move to a new algorithm since Bitmain announced that it would be selling the first Equihash ASIC miner of the market soon, but the attack speed up the process. The developers believe that changing the algorithm will make the network considerably safer against further attacks.

While the team believed that it would cause less disruption to wait more to change the algorithm, they also believe that the attack has caused enough disruption, so they agreed on changing it as soon as possible.